much obliged.

If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water. It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill 'em, and I’m going to kill 'em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way - of survival of the fittest.

-Ray Kroc

thanks

It’s just great that we won’t even need to retool that word after this era…

But of all the drugs I’ve ever done, nicotine is the only one where I still want it.

Same. I still want a cigarette and its been way more than 10 years.

Yeah the nicotine makes you just feel like you are dying.

I mean I enjoyed the hell out of it when I smoked. Love a cigarette and black coffee.

Meh

This is from the wsj article, the important bit:

Dershowitz, who represented Epstein after his first arrest, said, “It’s been a long time and I don’t recall the content of what I may have written.”

The book was put together by a New York City bookbinder, Herbert Weitz, according to people who were involved in the process. Weitz, who died in 2020, listed Epstein as a client on his website in 2003.

It isn’t clear how the letter with Trump’s signature was prepared. Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person.

“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

President Trump at the White House, partially obscured by foliage and an American flag. President Trump at the White House on Wednesday. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg News ‘Jeffrey enjoys his social life’ When he turned 50, Epstein was already wealthy from managing Wexner’s fortune and was socializing with Trump, Clinton and other powerful people at his Manhattan townhouse, Palm Beach, Fla., home and private Caribbean island.

I heard from another source there might be a letter from Trump to Epstein.

The thing that led me to never do anything with it was that I didn’t feel like anyone would ever buy into it enough to even take part in a conversation where it was deployed

Yeah I think its got to work for people to buy into it. And frankly my earliest implementations were “inconsistent” at best.

My thought right now is that the tool needs to do a first pass to encode the “meta-structure”, or perhaps… scaffolding(?) of a conversation… then proceed to encode the impressions/ leanings. I have tools that can do this in-part, but it needs to be… “bigger”… whatever that means. So there is sentiment analysis, easy enough. There is key phrase extraction. And thats fine for a single comment… but how do we encode the dynamic of a conversation? Well thats quite a bit more tricky.

Mods have a form of power that users/ participants in communities dont.

That’s it. That’s the thing in its entirety.

so can u tell me more about this project wen u have time?

Certainly! I can also give you code you can work and play around with yourself. I’m more than happy to send you some boiler plate you can play around with yourself.

but are you using it to attack users or to find out bad mod actions and proof of mods and admins and people like @PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au who obsess and witchhunt people they disagree with?

Well, not really any of the above. I’ve tried with some mild success to build a “troll detection” system, but it needs far more work. Also, in the months since my initial work on this matter, I’ve found some far better approaches and would want to implement them. So my old work isn’t reflective of the new direction I’m planning to take.

Fundamentally, I’m interested in these things from an academic perspective. How do conversations (debate) online work? What governs them? There are obviously rules (you can read them on the side bar), but there are also “rules” that aren’t written on the side bar. What are the unwritten rules?

What does it take to “change” someones mind? Or, more broadly, what does it take to change a communities mind? How do power dynamics play into that? For example, you’ve probably read my thread with @PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au at this point about the power mods have to steer the direction of a community.

Part of the reason I’m interested in this is because its part of my lived experience. I watch how myself and others were, frankly, absolutely brigaided against, for months, years on end, for holding critical but important positions on the Democratic party. It was very, very bad. We had opinions that were not very popular at the time and suffered as a result. But things changed, and time has shown we were right in our criticism. So what dynamics were at play that resulted in those perspectives being at first oppressed/ suppressed, to then become the dominant narratives? How does that work? What is its function?

Beyond that, I’m a quantitative person. I want a number at the end of the day; as shocking as it might be with all my discussion of narrative, at the end of the day I want a number, something solid I can stand on. So doing this kind of work in my own way, I want to find a way to quantify these things. Its not enough for me to simply look at an encode the stories; I want to put a number on it. That means building things up to be reproducible and automated to support large, if not census, level samples.

Finally, I really like doing network analysis. Its something I do professionally, but its just something I think is neat. Taking all of those previous questions and putting them into the context of a social network, thats something that sounds really challenging and fun to me.

And in regard to your other question:

this sounds gross and very much like witch-hunting and stalking. yes, all comments are public but u coming up w a tool just to find someones and analyze and make judgement on them seems gross and out of line. think of how fasicst and controling that sounds. what if some republican was doing that and bragged about it? think about that

I mean, you do realize that anyone, quite literally anyone, could form a 1 person instance and vacuum up all comment, post, etc… data from every other instance? I don’t have issue with it, in the same manner that I don’t have issue someone going through all 9k of my comments and reading them. If I didn’t want them to be made public, I wouldn’t make those comments. There are things I don’t say because I don’t want that information to be made public. Fundamentally these things are about power dynamics. For something to be fascistic or controlling I would have to have power over someone or something. I don’t. I have no secret access to any secret information, I have no power over any one or any thing. I’m simply working with and observing what is present.

This is a somewhat famous thread here that I recommend you read all of the comments of. Its the one @PhillipTheBucket@quokk.au and I are discussing. It also highlights the dynamic I’m interested in illustrating. Here is the link: https://lemmy.world/post/16224102?sort=Top

I recommend sorting by “Top” and reading through the first couple comment threads from top to bottom. Then scroll to the very bottom and read the comment threads in reverse order, basically most down voted. This should give you an idea for the type of dynamic I’m identifying, and the research I’m interested in conducting is how this dynamic shifted within our community. These days you would see an inversion of which narratives are being upvoted and which ones are being down-voted. So how did that come to be?

Lol. We get to the rub of the matter and you want to take your ball and go home.

He’s also doing something he rarely does - telling his base directly that their concerns don’t matter to him.

This is such a key.

Okay, but you can at least agree that mods have a form of power that user/participants dont?